


What Lies Deep

by Nerissa



Category: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)
Genre: Belonging, Canonical Child Loss, F/M, domestic angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21773638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: They bury their child in a land none of them belong to, and dream of what makes a home.
Relationships: Jane Porter/John "Tarzan" Clayton
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	What Lies Deep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MarieTurtle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarieTurtle/gifts).



His wife belongs here.

How is that even possible?

He is no slow study. He might not have been raised in the culture of his birthright, but he very quickly grasped the social order of this place. It is one which dictates that she is of the outside, the foreign and imported, and yet he bears witness to her belonging in a way he thinks might escape a more native observer.

Jane moves through the home like she is breath exhaled from the very lungs of the place. He marvels at how somebody not born in this land, not born of people born in this land, can make herself more a fixture, better fitted, than Greystoke’s own son. He tries only to admire and not envy, but man though he is, he is only man, after all. The teachings of the halls of worship in this country make it plain that man is uniquely situated to fall prey to envy, and at the sight of her, his best beloved, moving like blood and sinew through the body of his ancestral home, the knowledge that he sits in its guts like a foreign growth gnaws at him.

The knowledge that he refuses to be digested in his entirety gnaws deeper still.

The halls of worship in this land teach also that a man is to be lord in his home, a king in a castle just large enough to hold all he owns, and he thinks this teaching quaint. His contempt, he believes, is proof of his rebellion against the last gift his father gave him, and he is therefore an ungrateful son. The land that fed his body even as it consumed the bodies of those who brought him into the world had held different views of headship, lordship, and he remembers them every time he stands at the window of his sleeping chamber to stare out over what he has come home to claim.

He gives them greater ascendancy in his heart than he does the laws of his land, which is why, he has come to believe, the land rejects him.

He is meant to fulfill the earth, and subdue it. This is what the missionaries straggled to the Congo to proclaim; what they died, often, endeavouring to proclaim. It’s a man’s place in this world to subdue the land that feeds him, and they would have him believe that he, Lord Greystoke so born, has a greater responsibility to the land that bears name than the common man who has been fashioned from clay to work the clay and return to it when his labour is done.

“Why?” he’d asked Jane, when they were not yet a full year home. “What is it about Greystoke as my name and my home which proclaims me by birth, by God-given decree, more worthy a man than the men who have maintained it during my lifelong absence?”

“God only knows,” Jane had quipped. Then she must have read on his face the retreat, the shuttering out of the world that he had returned to as an immigrant in every sense of the world, and she softened. Cleaved her body to his, slim bright heat against the craggy mountain range of her husband’s physique, and they met as sun kisses mountaintops in its ascendancy every morning.

“They’re English, John. It . . . it’s a way of life to them. Titles and royalty, and—I don’t understand it either, really.”

Her hands traced a pattern of memory across his jawline, lingering at his lips until he turned his head to kiss her thumbprint and feel it burn a mark across his mouth.

“We don’t have to stay,” she whispered, a ghostly winter echo of her promise to him on the dock as they had awaited the ship that would take them home.

Her words were muted in the halls of the great home, as though she were sensible of perhaps causing it offence, this monument to his heritage, as she held in her arms everything that stood against the threat of its loss. Her husband, Greystoke’s son. This hesitancy was new, and it was part of what he saw in her that made her better suited to the home he brought her to than was he, the man born to inherit it, fit himself. In Africa she had not been muted; she had been laughing, merry, and confident.

“We don’t have to go, Tarzan,” she’d promised, snug against his side. “We can jump off the dock right now if you like. Swim to shore. Away from it all. And even if we do go, we don’t have to stay.” She tilted her head back so her hat wobbled against its pins and the sun lit her face. “What will they do, after all? Put us in irons?”

He felt they might as well have already. He’d chafed in the beige linen suit, the tan kid leather boots compressing his feet to what he was informed was a seemly width and what he deemed an unnatural point. He had not felt like the man she had addressed, and so he had bade her to address another.

“John,” he decided. He’d meant it as a suggestion only, but in claiming himself it had come out an order. His first, as the Earl of Greystoke. “I think—call me John.”

He had not acknowledged the rest of what she said. Not there on the docks, nor any moment thereafter.

If he agreed they did not have to stay, there was a risk he might believe it.

*

The promise she tries to offer now, reiterated within the halls of Greystoke is, necessarily, less alive than it had been under the sun that first fed it. For a moment he imagines his wife is, too, but no—his hands around her waist can feel her breath, the quickening of her life within her, and . . . something more.

She smiles up at him, sweet and knowing, something so much stronger than mere English ladyhood.

He believes, at this moment in time, that she will be strong enough for what they both expect will come to pass.

It does not.

Maybe their loss is Greystoke’s rejection of his rejection of it.

The ugly belief takes hold shortly after their child arrives, never to breathe the air of Europe or Africa nor any of the spaces between.

They place the little body where the halls of worship dictate it should lie, but John Clayton, in his heart, carries the soul of a son he will never know alongside the souls of the lord and lady who never knew theirs.

He relegates the spirit of his child to a tree he finds on the hillside, imagining that it feeds the root systems, that the strength of the tree stands as testament to the strength his son would have boasted if he had lived to claim it.

It is his most un English thought since arriving in England, so he does not share it with his wife. Yet the next morning he finds her in it, an English bride who is not English at all, all peaches and cream and bloody broken heart. She makes a gentle curve of linen and lace nestled into the niche where the branch meets the trunk, curled into a small knot like a child herself.

He climbs the tree and holds her, the two of them staring unspeaking into the east as the dawn cuts through fog and slashes bright, cold streaks of mirrored brilliance across the spring-dewed lawns.

*

He enters politics shortly thereafter, and Jane throws herself into local affairs. She becomes active in the church, and forebears to speak aloud to fellow parishioners her father’s singular views on religion, which she had always previously given her husband cause to believe she shared. There are soon children in their home after all—orphans from the city on charitable day trips, local village children who come to hear lectures on life in Africa, happy stories all, with much of her father in evidence in the way she holds herself, teaches, smiles, instructs.

He hungers for the sight of her in this role, and yet he keeps himself away, a starving man denying himself a banquet. As punishment.

For . . ?

He cannot even name it. Punishment for what? Failure to belong here? It would be absurd, to hold himself accountable for losses incurred prior to his very birth. And yet . . .

His heart inclines, not to the cold white marble in the church yard, the child’s name inscribed, the monument to their loss kept carefully ornamented with a rotation of fresh flowers and greenery trimmed from their hot house, but rather to the craggy unbidden might of the tree beneath which his heart had buried his son.

Even in death, he could not accord his birthright all it was owed of his flesh and its labours. Even in death, the child he keeps for himself.

Greystoke cannot have it.

* * *

Jane does not belong here. She feels it in the very marrow of her, ill-fit, and the harder she tries to be one with this place, the more painfully it rubs her raw round the edges.

She makes home of the people she meets, instead, and when there is a chance that she will make a person with the person she loves best, it seems like the best way to make her home here, too.

So when that does not come to pass, it feels like the final condemnation, the death blow, the sentencing of she and hers to this wet grey purgatory that she chose with such hope, and in which she now moulders in such despair.

She could not do it, if it were not for him.

Her husband, bright and golden as sunrise, lights up the corridors of the house that cannot claim him. Cannot tame him. He lies beside her at night and the heat of him banishes the cold from her bones, stirs her to nestle close, dreaming of a child whose face she never saw, growing strong in a land where he will never walk.

It is heaven and hell, what she feels and sees in her sleep, and the simple marriage of the two inside her soul is enough to make the church seem very small and tame in comparison to the unending torment and triumph she carries within her.

This place is her personal hell, and yet it is the place where her child feeds the land. Can she ever belong to a place as she does this one? It feels as though the two truths, irreconcilable, must pull her apart.

Yet, it must end. All things must end. It is their very nature, but even so she does not see how _this_ one can end until the day he comes home from the city with his news, and the way forward, the way out, lights her up from within.

Of course they will go back. They must. Why her husband cannot see it too, she struggles to understand. His rejection of her, his willingness to entomb her here . . . it frightens her. She wants to find the words to make him understand, but instead she wakes with the dawn, and for the first time she senses that her child has not fled with her sleep.

Instead he calls to her, from just up the hill, and she stumbles out of bed to seek him in the branches of a tree he will never climb, in the sweetness of the air he will never breathe, and the warm, clasping hand of the father who will never hold him.

She does not, in the end, have the words she needs to tell her husband what she feels, and that is all right. The things she most needs him to feel, to know, to hear are not things she could have told him anyway.

He draws her close against him in the dawn, presses her head to the heated breadth of his chest, and she feels what she felt all those years ago: his heart’s beat, his strength, the steady _yes_ that echoes from deep within.

And she is comforted.

He is hers beyond words, beyond loss and spoken choice.

He is hers, and Greystoke cannot have him.


End file.
